Tag: revive your marriage

“When you and your partner get stuck in a cycle of negativity and resentment, it’s tempting to declare that your relationship is officially over. Long-term, committed love never is. But we’ll never find the intimacy we long for if we walk away, because the problem doesn’t lie entirely with our spouse. Until we learn to resolve conflicts God’s way, turning to him in prayer, following with wholehearted surrender in whatever he asks us to do, and fighting for those we love with everything we’ve got, we’ll continually move from one broken relationship to the next.”

I have a friend that we’ll call Laura. Laura married her husband Jeff right out of university. Jeff came from a blue collar family, and was the first to pursue higher education among his immediate relatives. He was a hard worker, and Laura loved that about him. He was focused. He was responsible.

When they had children, Laura stopped working to stay at home, because Jeff was now a corporate exec in a multinational company. And Jeff worked. A lot. In fact, he worked at least six days a week, and of those six days, was only home two or three when the children were still awake. Fourteen hour days were par for the course.

Laura spoke with him about this at length when the kids were young, and his response was that he knew the kids were safe with her and thriving, but he needed to put in these hours so that they could reach their dreams, and be able to retire early and give their kids so many great experiences and opportunities. Laura told him that she thought the kids wanted more of him. He replied that this would mean having to leave his job, and there’s no way he’d find another one that would let him be home more at even half the income, so it wasn’t an option.

And this is where Laura made a decision that likely many people would find difficult, if not wrong.